ICloud: Pros & Cons Please

Question

I'm one of the duffers still on MobileMe, for no better reason than I've been too busy to make the switch. After years of dumping money and time into that lousy service, I'm dubious about going with Apple again for syncing/backup. When it worked (and mostly it didn't), it was a huge faff. I could never completely rely on it, so I had to have other fail-safes, including DropBox, SugarSync, and a Time Machine. As a result I've got bits and bobs of data stored all over the shop. My main conclusion from the experience was: try to live with one machine, as syncing is too much trouble.
Is iCloud better? Here are my needs. I'm an academic, so I have large amounts of data; mainly photos, music and documents. I have a three year-old iMac and a one year-old MacBook Air, both running Snow Leopard, and a one-day old iPhone 4s. My iMac needs a good weeding out, as it is packed with massive quantities of field data (like large-file NEF photos), much of which I don't need. I do have a large music collection, which would be tough to pare down as part of my research is ethnomusicological. As it stands, there is no way I could sync content across all three machines as the other two don't have the space. Nor am I sure I'd want to.
I'm not bothered about the money for upgrading to Lion, nor purchasing extra storage - I already fork out for DropBox, Zotero, Evernote etc. I'm more worried about my time, and the reliability of the service. I've already ditched tons of silly third-party time-wasters from my iPhone and am so far working pretty well with the native ones, especially now that Siri has come along (it's been one day; I'm still in love). I do use iTunes and the iCloud Match and re-download functions seem useful. Photostream I could take or leave. Documents synced across all devices would be brilliant, assuming it works generally like DropBox does. Calendar/Contacts/Mail/Notes/Reminders sync must work. A simple and reliable Backup service would be the holy grail.
So, for those of you using iCloud - is it worth it? Does it do what Apple says it does? Could this replace some of the other services/procedures I'm using? Beyond initial set-up, how much time does it take to maintain?
Any advice appreciated.

Answer 1

If you plan on updating your Macs to OS X Lion, you can use some trickery to get iCloud to sync any document between Macs only. As for syncing documents between your iPhone and a Mac version of the same app, the iCloud API has not been widely implemented, so right now it mainly works between the desktop and mobile versions of iWorks. Hopefully that will be opened up across a lot more apps, it could prove to be quite handy. The only thing that may stand in your way is the free 5Gb limit, but you can pay to have that raised. Not as good of value as Dropbox though, but when the mobile and desktop versions of more apps start interacting with each other; the value will be realized a bit more. Once you set it up, there's literally no maintanence; everything is automatic. It's too soon to put reliability through its paces, but I have yet to have a hickup in service past the initial setup phase (that has its glitches and ways to fix them, took me about an hour or two, because some switches didn't get flipped when I turned off syncing through iTunes; my contacts, calender, and mail were not syncing. Fixed now). I have all info syncing flawlessly between two Macs, PCs, and an iPod Touch. Also, for good measure, I duplicate calenders, contacts, and mail to Google in case I want to start using Android.
As for iTunes in the cloud, I read about a limit of 25000 songs. Now, I don't know if that is the number of songs you are allowed to upload in case iTunes can't find them in the store, or if that's the hard limit of songs you can transfer. Depending on how many songs you have, this may be a problem. Seems like a great service though (I'm not on it).
I would look into switching, but